12 comments:

I've always found this one of the most fascinating of the Long Island estates---the way the house grew from large to vast, the dream-like quality of the composition--an almost Maxfield Parish quality to some of the vistas, and as ever, the master of texture and detail that McKim Mead & White brought to their commissions. Morgan must have been an interesting patron, as his summer house at Newport, also by McKM&W was very out of the box and amazingly sited also

i'm with DED. i mean, look at those three porches covered with vegetation and the size and all the detail work. this is one of my favorites too. its nice, i suppose the wings are extant but they cut the good part out and left the scraps. a big barn and i ditto the Maxfield Parrish comment. the old aerial photos that show the synergy of these huge places like this one and meudon really give you a feel for what they were like at their height. the ones that survive always have some major feature missing - usually the gardens - and without that feature, they lose a lot of their punch. they were designed to be seen in their entirety. sigh....

a sidebar - i was looking at the pix of "face to an estate" and thinking that not only are they really spiffy dressers but how many of your friends you went to elementary school with were named foxhall, pierpoint or conger or even anson for that matter. also, many of them are always referred to by all three names - something we don't do much up here in the sticks. the rich really are different.

security word def - "polic" - law enforcement in this country after the GOP budget cuts.

Really one of the great houses in American history, to my mind. Beautiful, balanced, elegant, perfectly proportioned. And its vast size was handled in a very skillful manner. Would that some of today's McMansion architects had some of that skill.

Since Newport's Beacon Rock was mentioned, I have a question that I hope someone might be able to answer. On the Beacon Rock website which was posted here, and on many other websites across over the internet, it is stated that Edwin D, Morgan III was a cousin of J.P. Morgan. A few sites actually claim the two were brothers, even though J.P. Morgan had only sisters. I'm distantly related to the J.P. Morgans through the Pierpont line, and I've read tons of books about the man, but I've never been able to uncover any familial relationship between his family and Edward Denison Morgan's family. It almost seems that the families SHOULD be related, as both have old New England roots and both found their first real financial success in Hartford, Connneciticut during roughly the same era, but I can find no evidence of them being related at all. Does anybody know how the two might be genealogically connected? I would have asked the person or persons who operate that Beacon Rock website, but there doesn't seem to be any address with which to contact them.

per genealogy.com, "The first Morgans, the brothers, James, John,and Miles had come to Boston from Wales in 1636. E.D. Morgan descended from James; his contemporaries Junius S. and J.P. Morgan descended from Miles."